NASA's LCROSS probe has confirmed the presence of water on the lunar surface, including buckets of the stuff in a shadowed crater near the moon's south pole.
"Indeed, yes, we found water," said LCROSS principal investigator Anthony Colaprete said during a news conference today at NASA's Ames Research Center. "And we didn't find …

@Ned Ludd

IIRC, it costs a couple hundred thousand dollars to ship a 1kg mass into space. Given that a 2 gallon (US) bucket of water should weigh 7.57kg, it's rather more expensive than anyone really wants to deal with if possible.

Presumably, you're not actually interested in shipping water back from the moon.

Bet there's a hosepipe ban though

Darn, it'll be a tough job

Fantastic! but....

This is really good news!

However, as this water is now a natural resource on the moon. How long till get get the Gray-brigade (the moon isnt Green now is it? ) telling us that we cant use the natrural resourse as its not sustainable.

What about the moon landings

Water Conservation

Google says that the total surface of the moon is 153 million square meters of which 14 thousand square meters is in permanent shadow. So there probably isn't that much moon water that can be easily extracted. Probably best not to squander it.

Oops - sorry - that should read, in internationally approved El Reg units, 5011.7383 Belgiums and 0.4586 Belgiums respectively (give or take a few milliWales).

Cost of water to the moon.

Is currently unknown. Space Adventures (IIRC) are offering a personal lunar flyby at c$20m so assuming a typical Merkin passenger at 100kg (to keep the math simple) that would be $200k/kg.

However the NASA kids website, explaining the ISS golden show processing system said they put it in because water is roughly $20k/litre.

The latest copy of Spaceflight has an article on the ESA "Melissa" closed cycle life support project. This gives figures for daily human consumable and estimates a trip to Mars would need about 95tonnes with an open cycle (open, hydrate, crap, dump) system.

Colour me sceptical...

but I don't think this is a cause for rejoicing.

We've always assumed there was SOME water on the Moon - there's SOME everywhere, bound into crystals and the like. What we had hoped for in a shaded crater was sheets of solid water ice. And getting 24 gallons out of a kiloton-sized explosion is a very small amount - you would get more out of the Sahara sand.

There still might be solid water ice on the Moon, but I don't think we found it with this experiment. And if this is all there is, I suspect we will be hauling water up from Earth for quite a while yet....

@TrevorPrinn, @DJV

One great Heinlein book

And it would make a dandy movie, a better one than Starship Troopers. As Jane Fonda is now way too old, I could name a few current actresses for Miss Knott, and we have the SFX for a great movie. I want to see boxcars lobbed down to earth!

Rad water

@Ned Ludd

".......some sort of long hose taking advantage of earth's gravitational pull would be much more efficient."

Don't be silly. With that level of siphonic pressure you'd never stop it once started. There'd be a long, loud sucking noise, the moon would shrink and the Earth's water levels would rise dramatically*. The sudden shift in mass between Moon and Earth would destabilise the system causing The End Of The World**.

*Pissing off the Carbon Cultists who think they have a monopoly on this one.

water on Earth

Good news to a point..

..but water generally has organisms on it. Where as this could be good news, it could also mean bad. Yes, Dr. W-who was on last night ("Waters of Mars"), but thinking of it rationally, I'm not talking about Alien Posessions et al. I'm more concerned with further organisms that might contaminate our already contaminated water supply here on Earth.

I say we set up Moon Base Alpha and do tests on it. I vote for being Tony Verdeschi (RIP)